Over the years I’ve given out architecture pro-tips to colleagues and friends who’ve noticed there are faster ways of getting things done at work. I’ve decided to collect these tips here, hoping it will make the world a better place. Sort by category, “Faster Architect” (derived from Faster Pussycat…)

Tired of waiting for Photoshop to load just to resize an image? Worried about giving up precious memory to a non-CAD application? Enjoy lightweight, high-performance mini-applications? You should use IrfanView.

Free download, extremely small footprint (opens instantly on even the slowest machines), lots of useful features. Resize, rotate, crop, save as another format, batch processing, slide shows… And everything has a shortcut key. It’s so fast you use just S for Save-As, not Ctrl-Shift-S.